Daughter's Birthday wish

[drbabe]

Thought I'd share something nice: for her tenth birthday, my daughter asked to "build a kid-sized rowboat with daddy." Notwithstanding that we have a pram I made a while back, I'm goin' for it. I have a bunch of nice designs bookmarked, all in the 9-10 foot range. But best of all, there's a free program called HULL, which allows you to design almost anything you want.
http://www.carlsondesign.com/#Fun_Shareware

along with the tutorial below, you'll see all the cool stuff you can do with it:

http://home.clara.net/gmatkin/hullstut.htm

In addition to a couple hundred hull designs, you can plot ballast, load, check out waterline as you change load, plot pieces out on plywood, do 3-D modeling, get offsets for lofting, and a bunch of other stuff.

Best of all, I'm looking forward to the project with my girl. I'll try to post photos of the progress. I have two boys, 12 and 5, and the little one is good with his hands, but mostly too young, yet. The older one ain't interested in all the tools. The girl, though, she likes making things. You might say she's the boy I always wanted.